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World's laziest CEO. Before starting the highly-successful Proxycurl and Sapiengraph, Steven founded 5 other startups: Gom VPN, Kloudsec, SilvrBullet, NuMoney, and SharedHere.
I am not good at fund-raising mostly because I struggle to empathize with investors. The genius of Elon Musk Elon Musk is a helluva entrepreneur. I do not agree with everything he does, but there is one thing I admire about him -- his ability to don the investor hat,
Most people do not know how to write great titles. To write a great title, it boils down to "What's in it for you (the reader)?" In this post, I will be using email subjects as examples. However, the same techniques can be used on titles
There are no CRMs out there that is good enough to serve my lazy ass. CRMs require discipline, and if I have to take N minutes of my day to maintain my CRM, I will not use a CRM. Also, if I cannot even be bothered to do it, how
For far too many times in my career, I have felt a dreaded gloom as I thump away on my keyboard, wondering why my efforts were not translating into actual results. Products always begin well with accelerating progress, then they hit a milestone, and it seems like no matter what
It was a > 10x returns in a few months. But I did not sell it, and I still hold my coins to this day. There lies the problem with me; I do not have an exit plan until it is too late like how I started a commitment to
I am trying to grow shrimps. But the home for these shrimps is a planted tank. And it is not easy building a planted tank in Singapore. First, I need a chiller to bring down the temperature to 23 degrees Celcius. Then I need a CO2 cylinder, to mist the
The task to crawl Singaporeans on Professional Social Network was dispatched to a programmer two weeks ago. But up till yesterday, it was not close to being done yet. The programmer was still extracting everything he can from the profile. There lies the problem(s) The first is obviously in
We sent out the offer letter for our marketer today, and we are ramping up our marketing efforts for Nubela. Since I started writing daily, I have subscribed to a fair bit of transparency. And in the same vein, I decided I will "open source" our step by
> Warning: There is no point to this post. I am writing down some thoughts that I have been incubating in my head. Grab has maxed out its total addressable market (TAM). In spite of its dominant position, Grab's revenue from its ride-hailing service is far too low
I received a response from my first CMO applicant today. He wrote a sample blog post which left me with more questions after I read it. I will attach his sample post at the end of this article. The questions I asked were: 1. Who is the target audience for
> Hi steven. I think we do not report ___ to the police. Just tell them that we find out he stole the money from us and we forgive him. Putra sent this message to me at 8:07 pm this evening on my way back from work. An ex-employee was
In this article, I am introspecting about my daily blog posts. A link for everything These days, I seem to have a link to explain my thought, which is already jotted down in this blog. I have to push through the fatigue It is 12:23 am right now, and
She was an SMU alumni and I wasted $20,000 on her wages over 5 months. She excelled in what SMU trained their students to be -- professional talkers. I should have given her a hiring test. She stole from me SMU saleswoman was hired because Kloudsec [https://giki.wiki/
Mario is my intern for this summer. A shocker on Mario's first day I did not interview Mario as I usually would for interns because he came introduced from an esteemed source. Instead, I skipped right to the programming test for Mario, and he passed with the usual
We carved out 2 weeks to build this because all other CRMs suck. My team and I ain't got no time to manually enter every detail of our customers into the CRM, and I want every detail in our CRM. My CRM must do these things for me
But the only thing I automated was insincerity with automated emails. Now that I am back focusing on sales for Nubela, why is is the sales process so menial? Silver Bullet Storytime. Before NuMoney and right after the fateful death of Kloudsec, the company downsized to just Bach and me;
Our little internal project got a customer without us asking for it. Remember TMP [https://nubela.co/blog/we-automated-our-managers-away/]? Right after I shared it, our staff shared his experiences with another startup, and the CEO of the other startup demonstrated immediate interest. Insofar that he got his team to build
It is my opinion that deadlines belong to an undisciplined company. I have no good stories of deadlines Against the backdrop of the Bitcoin bull run of December 2017, we were racing against time to finish building NuMoney, our cryptocurrency exchange. We wanted to ride the wave and capture as
Everyone has at least one inner demon, and it is usually an embellishment of one of the seven deadly sins. My inner demon is wrath, and anger is a helluva drug. The time I screamed "get the fuck out" and have an employee fired Today I want to
We will wait till Monday when the engineers are in the office. That is what. If you have been in the game long enough like I have, you will learn that it is impossible to be "always-on". It helps that NuMoney Exchange has been deprecated. Most things can
I asked my staff why he stopped taking initiative Once, I asked my staff why he stopped taking the initiative at work. He replied that he learned not to do it because most things get canceled anyway. Then, I brushed it off as a poor attitude, until it happened to
It was not interesting to me at all since I assumed: 1. That the entire world is already doing drop-shipping since the barrier of entry is so low 2. The top sellers on Amazon already have dropshipping nailed, and their advantage is further cemented with their SEO prowess and Amazon
This is the story of how we found we found out the ages of our users without asking for the information. The Ops team needs demographics data Aldy, the CMO for LandX, made a request for on demographics data of the users we have in LandX. Seems easy. Because we
I have been using this excuse for the longest time as an excuse to speak my mind without care for the hurt that it might inflict on other parties. Last Friday, I wrote a post titled "Sales and Marketing are from Mars, and Engineers are from Venus [https://nubela.
I cannot remember how many times I have told myself that I will find myself a comfortable job after X stint. I do not quit. The more rejections I suffer, the more fired up I become. When I had my first profitable company stolen from me by a conniving couple
